About this time of year we hear a lot about the acronym S.A.D. That stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder…in other words, depression. Not necessarily the rough kind, clinical depression, but instead the mild form with the weeping, melancholy thoughts, inability to do much but hang around the house watching soaps and eating leftover Christmas candy.

There are many remedies for S.A.D. Just a dose of good fresh air sometimes does the trick or taking a long ride. Having visitors over for coffee is a good cure for the blues. We all have those from time to time, especially right after Christmas.

Clinical depression is harder to treat and much, much harder with which to deal. It involves chemicals in the body that aren’t quite meshing as they should and it, most times, takes an anti-depressant to be able to look on the bright side of life again.

Unfortunately, clinical depression has very different social repercussions from other illnesses. People don’t think twice when you call in and say you have the flu and won’t be in for a week or so. Okay fine. No problem.

But when you call in and say, “I’m sad,” I can guarantee you you’ll be looked upon as suspect and if you get any time off I’d be surprised. At least that’s the way we imagine people will react.

Since I’ve suffered from it most of my life I can say that depression is one of the worst sicknesses one can have. You can continue with life if, for instance, you have the flu. You can write, you can read, you can get your mind on other things.

Not so with the one who is clinically depressed. When you are depressed, you can do nothing, think nothing. Not down in the dumps, mind you, but something a lot scarier. “Gosh, that movie was depressing.” or “I’ll be 64 next year, how depressing.”

Real depression is debilitating. It’s down-in-the-dumps times a thousand. You feel there is no way out; you hate yourself for feeling that way; and all you do is cry. No amount of Blue Bell ice cream is going to help this malady without outside help.

It’s a CHEMICAL problem, just like having red hair or having the flu and it’s ten times more awful. You wake up one morning and it’s as if a gray fog has sunk down over your bed, you get the shakes, and feel like your life is worthless. And, no, it doesn’t have to be worthless for you to think it is.

I can remember friends and family telling me, “Count your blessings. You have people who love you to help you, we live in a free country, and you are not unloved like Nancy Pelosi and Michael Moore.”

Pep talks like that do little, if any, good. Our enemy is within, not without, and our minds are hard taskmasters when they are on a mission to depress and discourage. Let me encourage you right now. You are NOT going crazy and you are not going to have a nervous breakdown.

There really is no such thing as a nervous breakdown, by the way. We don’t literally fall apart, our emotions have just become depleted and it’s as if you were an old car and the battery was dead yet some fool is still revving the accelerator for all they’re worth. It won’t start but you continue to make it weaker and weaker.

That happened to me once when we lived in Alabama. We were to go out on Saturday night with some friends and by mid afternoon I began to sob and had no earthly idea why. I had been taking diet pills but had come off those (never realizing something like that could cause withdrawal) so my husband could only conclude, “She’s gone crazy.”

No, I hadn’t, but my neighbor did take me to the hospital for the doctor to see me and, long story short, the pills had been the culprit and mixed with the strung-out nerves and pumping adrenalin I would have made a pretty decent crazy person if I had been one. I was started on anti-depressants then for the first time in my life.

I stayed in the hospital for a week to get all the diet pills out of my body and I met quite an interesting array of, let’s just say what Celestine Sibley said, folks who had “turned funny.”

There was the woman whose husband was the superintendent of schools and who had set fire to all the high schools in the county; the old lady who had wallpapered her mobile home with chewing gum wrappers; the teenager who had blue hair to the floor on one side of her head and green hair on the other side, but just to her chin. Of course, the meeting room was filled with dull faces and blank stares and folks sitting around in their pajamas. Someone called that: dementia walmartia.

I have learned in all these years of being on meds that much of this area of medicine, like most, is trial and error. “Now this one will work but this other one has an equal chance of working.” In other words, we don’t what the heck will fix you but we’re gonna try everything in our arsenal.

Is it any wonder we say Yes when offered a pill from our friend who’s “been through the same thing?” I mean, I’ve got a friend who takes so many pills she made Michael Jackson look like a Christian Scientist.

We do what we have to when we are suffering. It’s that simple. I wish anti-anxiety and anti-depressant meds were as easily available without the patient feeling guilty when he fills them or, worse yet, feels like a drug addict.

Some people don’t believe in clinical depression as an actual diagnosable medical condition. They say, “Drugs are a crutch. You just need to get exercise, eat right, and think positive. It’s all in your head.”

These people are known as “stupid jerks who should keep their stupid mouths shut!”

Of course there is potential for abuse or over-reliance on drugs and certainly in some cases diet, lifestyle, and mindset have a lot to do with treating depression. But in most cases where people are suffering with clinical depression—chemical imbalances in the brain—it will take a combination of behavioral changes AND medication.

If you have never personally experienced the true darkness of real depression be nice and keep your pie hole shut. And shame on anyone who considers it a sign of weakness to seek help for depression.

Even after all these years doctors still aren’t sure why the chemicals in some people’s brains get screwed up. But they do know plenty of external factors that can influence it.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 20% of all American adults will suffer from clinical depression or one of its relatives (like bipolar disorder, OCD, Scrupulosity] at some point in their lives, and 9.5% suffer from it in any given 12-month period. In other words, assuming the people you associate with are American adults, there’s a pretty good chance that one-tenth of the people you associate with are dealing with depression or some other form of it right now.

So, hold your fire. Maybe depression has not hit your home with fullforce yet but chances are you’ll get a good face-to-face look at it at some point in your life. Be careful not to judge others.

There used to be a quote going around that went like this:

“The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness.

Look at your 3 best friends, dear hearts. If they’re okay, then it’s you.”